Why they're hitting the wrong notes at the Glastonbury Festival

The crowd watching Dolly Parton performing on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival

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Multi-millionaire Bruce Dickinson, lead singer with heavy metal band Iron Maiden, is surely right when he says the Glastonbury Festival has been ruined by the bourgeois middle class.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mr Dickinson on a couple of occasions when he has visited the Vale of Glamorgan to attend to his business interests.

Funnily enough, on those occasions he has looked the epitome of a middle-class businessman rather than the wild man of rock. He is as sharp as a pin and knows where his business interests lie, rather like Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis.

Sitting in the comfort of his battered armchair, your Man on the Street, who likes to think of himself as working class but is probably middle class, watched highlights of this year’s festival.

Mr Dickinson’s criticism is correct, but the situation is much more worrying than he suggests and goes to the heart of many of the social and cultural ills afflicting our society.

I enjoyed the set by Paulo Nutini, a one-time working-class lad from Scotland who has become the darling of a certain section of the middle class. But I particularly admired the set given by LA indie band Foster the People.

The music was excellent. It was when the camera panned across the exultant crowds that I began to worry.

Amid the thousands of cheering fans – each of whom had paid more than £200 plus booking fee and other expenses to be there – I struggled to spot one black face. As far as I could make out there were no Muslims in attendance. It was a sea of white, probably middle-class, faces.

If Glastonbury is one of this country’s premier cultural festivals, that situation is surely deeply concerning

I may be wrong, but the festival featured little music from ethnic minorities, and didn’t explore Muslim or any other cultural backgrounds. Instead we had to endure the inanities of Dolly Parton.

This concern about the cultural exclusion of large sections of our society is not confined to Glastonbury. Look at Wimbledon.

I review in this newspaper many of the classical music concerts at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall. Most of the time there are only a handful of black students in the audience. If there are any Muslims there I don’t come across them.

I once attended a concert of Indian classical music given by the late Ravi Shankar at the hall, but such culturally diverse events are rare indeed.

The only place I have seen black people gathered en masse in Cardiff has been at the City Temple Pentecostal church, in Cardiff, where they celebrate their Christian faith with the same sort of dedication and fervour that Muslims celebrate theirs.

It’s unlikely that those Pentecostal believers would ever contemplate visiting a mosque, or that fervent Muslims would pop into the City Temple to discuss the meaning of faith and their cultures.

That is a great pity.

It’s been a long while since I visited the mosque in Barry, but I have fond memories of it, if only because of the excellence of the vegetable samosas and the warmth of the welcome.

There is a good deal of anguished discussion among the chattering classes about the threat militant Islam poses to this country, a fear heightened in Cardiff following would-be medical student Nasser Muthana’s appearance in an Isis video.

As usual when such disturbing events occur, there will be a few weeks of debate by middle-class politicians and social workers about how the situation can be improved before things get back to as they were.

But until there is a deeper melding on a basic cultural level the threat and the problems will remain.

A question for Chris in Royal Box

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle after Jonathan Dimbleby wrongly quoted Rhondda MP Chris Bryant on last weekend’s edition of Radio Four’s Any Questions?, which was broadcast live from Cardiff Bay.

The misquote related to Mr Bryant’s views on “fracking.” Apologies have been made and accepted.

However, it seemed to me that Mr Bryant was somewhat embarrassed by the revelation on the programme that he had taken “a day off work” to watch tennis from the Royal Box at Wimbledon, at the invitation of Labour stalwart Harriet Harman.

Of course, warriors for the working class have to be careful about where they are seen.

As many of Mr Bryant’s constituents languish in penury and consequent ill health, it might have been better had he declined the invitation.

Eliot right on value of libraries

A chap phoned to voice his concern I had not quoted TS Eliot in these pages for several months.

Meanwhile, my predecessor in Barry, Alec McKinty, rang up to comment on my mentioning Sir John Betjeman last week.

Funnily enough, I had contemplated quoting Eliot in a recent column headlined: “Fast Walking to Library Oblivion” about the threat to libraries as a result of cost cutting.

I didn’t then, but I will now : “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”

I hope that pleases my caller and gives pause for thought to those who would dare contemplate closing our libraries.